Make It Stop: Why Banning Goalpost Dunks is a New NFL Low

Time once more for Make It Stop, in which we count down the four things this week that must stop.

**1. The NFL outlawing goal-post dunks. **Last season Saints tight end Jimmy Graham caused a delay in gameplay when he dunked on the goal post after a touchdown and accidentally knocked the post off of alignment. Now, I can understand why the NFL would want to prevent such delays in the future, but I don’t think they banned this move (which has been done many times in the past without any adverse effect on the poor crossbar) as a matter of practicality. No no, this was NFL headmaster Roger Goodell acting with the League’s Competition Committee to tut-tut the players and do everything possible to tamp down any on-field displays of individuality and/or (gasp!) imagination. No dunking over the post. No group celebrations. No using the ball as a prop. The ball must stay spiritually a ball at all times. The League prefers the emptiest, most public gesture possible.

Meanwhile, the NFL has yet to formally punish Colts owner Jim Irsay for driving shitfaced with $29K in his pocket and half a CVS running through his bloodstream. When a player does something mildly objectionable (if this can even be categorized as such), the League must ACT. But when some dipshit owner does something far worse (mind you, Browns owner Jimmy Haslam is STILL being investigated for massive, widespread corporate fraud), the NFL is more than happy to take its time. And when half the Broncos’ front office got DUIs last year, the League let the team mete out its own form of sympathetic discipline ("We’re not in the business of tearing apart lives. We’re in the business of trying to help people who need their lives built back up.")

It’s nice to be an owner or a GM, because all of your transgressions will take place away from a camera, and the League is catering to corporate sponsors and older fans who are—SHOCKEROO—middle-aged dudes just like you! But because players like Graham dunk on a goal post in front of other human beings, and because he’s a young whippersnapper (who also happens to be in the middle of a contract dispute, which is so very classless), they get the full brunt of moral disapproval from fans and the League alike. Rams coach Jeff Fisher said taunting was "out of control." Really? Did you see any full-scale rioting on the field last season? Do you really think it’s possible for players to ert the maximum amount of physical aggression and then spend all their time between plays acting like fucking butlers? It’s horseshit. Let them dunk. Let them celebrate and let NFL players display some modicum of personality. In catering to the old fart demographic, the NFL is locking itself inside an attic and coating itself with dust bunnies.

**2. Nostalgia for your local bookstore. **I didn’t realize there were any bookstores left out there, but the mourning parade for Mom & Pop’s Obscure French Poetry Boutique and the like continues in earnest. I write books, so I support bookstores just like any author is obliged to do, but I don’t consider the shuttering of a bookstore the death knell of literary culture. Hop onto Goodreads and you will find out that people still like reading quite a bit, and if they choose to digest those books via Kindle or from ordering online or from some other, almost certainly less expensive outlet, then more power to them. Like record-store mourners and video-store mourners (do those exist? I hope they don’t exist), these are people who are treating a transfer of cultural habits as some kind of permanent death. It’s a strain of technophobia that’s been around ever since people bitched about movies being in color, and it’s probably just a veiled way for an author to be sad that he can’t go to a bookstore and see his own shit sitting there on a shelf like a goddamn trophy.

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**3. Two men in adjacent gym showers having a loud conversation. **What are you doing? This isn’t a fucking bar. You’re there to bathe yourself. I’m in the next shower over. I don’t wanna hear about the legal brief you just filed. Who the fuck are these people? Why are there so MANY of them? Stop talking and get washing. This is lunacy.

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